It's officially summer and the weekend is here. For some folks, this means spending time outdoors for the next couple of days. If you are a computer guy or gal, however, you may be sun adverse -- spending time inside tinkering with your PC could be more fun than the beach or the pool. If that is you (it's definitely me!), I have a suggestion -- why not try a new Linux distribution this weekend? Hell, there are countless such operating systems from which to choose.

Today, a lesser known Linux-based operating system achieves a milestone. Called "Peppermint," version 9 is now available for download. If you are still holding onto some old hardware, you might want to pay attention. Not only is the OS designed to be light on resources, but Peppermint's developers are still maintaining a 32-bit version of the Ubuntu-based distro.

"Team Peppermint are pleased to announce Peppermint 9, the latest iteration of our operating system. Based on the 18.04 LTS (long term support) code base, Peppermint 9 still comes in both 64bit and 32bit flavors so older hardware is still supported. We hope you enjoy using it half as much as we did putting it together," saysMark Greaves, Peppermint.

Greaves shares the following list of changes.

We have replaced lxrandr with xfce4-display-setttings for monitor settings as we continue to look for better options that add functionality without adding weight, and to continue the migration away from the few remaining LXDE components.

By user request the Menulibre menu editor is now installed by default, and no longer breaks the menus as it did in previous Peppermint versions.

Continuing the theme of improved menu and launchere management, there is now a right-click “Create new launcher here” desktop context menu item.

The Nemo file manager now has a right-click “Send by email” context menu item. (requires an email client such as Thunderbird to be installed).

The Panel Reset function in the Peppermint Settings Panel no longer needs to log you out of your session to reset the panel

The Xfce Panel Switch utility is now installed by default, so you can now backup/restore any custom panel configurations and switch between them. It includes a Peppermint-9 default profile and a few others to play with.

The system Notification Settings (in the settings panel) now has a “Do Not Disturb” function, or notifications can be enabled/disabled on a per application basis.

Qt applications such as VLC now honor the system Gtk theme.

Gtk overlay scrollbars are now enabled by default, they’re growing on us ;)

The graphical screenshot utility has switched from pyshot to xfce4-screenshooter.

Symlinks are in place so any installed Snaps and Flatpaks will now show up in the main menu.

There is a new “find your mouse cursor” keyboard shortcut (Alt+C)

The Chromium web browser has been replaced Firefox again (who knows, one day we might make our minds up) ;)

New Gtk Themes, based on Arc but with a few tweaks and some additional color choices, including the red default.

Awesome new Artwork courtesy of Karl Schneider .. many thanks Karl.

New Microsoft Office Online SSB’s .. Even though these are simply links to the free online ‘web app’ version of Office, we are fully aware some people won’t like anything containing the word ‘Microsoft’ on their system, so please be aware they are easily removed from within the ICE application with just a couple of mouse clicks.

New Skye Web Client SSB. This is mainly for 32bit users because Microsoft no longer create a 32bit native skype client for Linux. So if you’re running 32bit Peppermint and require Skype, this is the only way to access it.

ICE now has a few international translations (and will gain more over time via updates), it has also been fixed to remove the ‘half’ green lock symbol that displayed when on SSL sites.

The Kernel is now the 4.15 series (4.15.0-23 on the ISO)

The Nemo file manager is now verion 3.6.5

We’re now back at with the upstream Ubuntu version of Gdebi which has the uninstall option (the previous version did not).

And Peppermint 9 is now the 18.04 LTS code base, so has access to all the latest software.

Ready to download Peppermint 9 and have fun playing with the operating system? You can grab the 32-bit ISO here and the 64-bit ISO here. If you aren't sure which to get, please know that most computers in the last decade should be 64-bit.